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Article Excerpt
Revisiting the concept of transgovernmentalism, originally developed by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, can shed considerable light on the nature of interstate cooperation in contemporary global financial governance. Transgovernmentalism highlights how certain technocratic policy communities, composed of finance ministries, central banks, and regulators, dominate the global financial architecture. It also provides insights into the political and social basis of these actors' interactions and deliberations. Most importantly, renovating the concept of transgovernmentalism brings the participatory deficits in the current global financial architecture into sharp focus and points us in the direction of a workable reform agenda that would expand inclusion and participation. This article advocates basing future reform on efforts to achieve a closer realization of the principle of "deliberative equality." Unfortunately, "transgovernmentalism" is incompatible with deliberative equality, meaning that it is precisely the transgovernmental characteristics of the current global financial architecture that have to be challenged and overturned if we are to arrive at anything approximating deliberative equality. KEYWORDS: global financial architecture, transgovernmental politics, G7, G-20, deliberation.
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Over thirty years ago, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye published a seminal article in the journal World Politics that outlined the concept of transgovernmental relations. (1) In the intervening period, political scientists have rarely applied the concept in empirical research, fewer still sought to revise it for the contemporary era. In this article, I make the argument that a renovated version of the concept of transgovernmentalism can make a significant contribution to our understanding of the political dynamics of the current global financial architecture (GFA). (2) As a concept, transgovernmentalism not only reveals much about the nature of interstate cooperation in contemporary global financial governance, but also brings the participatory deficits in the current GFA into sharp focus and points in the direction of a modest, workable reform agenda that would increase inclusion and participation.
The review of the GFA undertaken after the Asian financial crisis involved three distinct trends. There was both a partial privatization of financial governance evident in the creation of twelve codes and standards that were designed to enhance market scrutiny of national policies and practices (3) and a limited shift away from the "club" model of diplomacy evident in the creation of the G-20, which challenged the monopoly of leading developed countries. Most significantly, the architectural exercise consolidated and deepened the transgovemmental characteristics of the GFA. The transgovernmental nature of the GFA restricts participation in key deliberative spaces to a limited number of regulators and central state agencies (almost exclusively finance ministries, central banks, and specialist regulatory agencies), which dominate and control the deliberations that determine the terms and content of global financial governance, resulting in a narrow, technocratic, closed insider policy process that remains largely impenetrable to a wider range of concerned societal interests. While there is some evidence of a shift in global governance arrangements toward a more polycentric form of "complex multilateralism" in which various civil society groupings, nonstate actors, and developing countries participate alongside more traditional advanced capitalist state bureaucracies in the form of trisectoral networks, (4) I argue in this article that the principal defect of the global financial architecture is that it remains insufficiently pluralist and that this is a direct result of its overriding transgovernmental character.
I begin with a brief discussion of the growing significance of the concept of deliberation for the study of global governance, including some consideration of the importance of the issues of participation and representation in the act of deliberation. Next, I discuss the concept of transgovernmental ism and apply this to the contemporary global financial architecture. Finally, I focus on the normative question of whether the degree of participation represented by this transgovernmental politics is adequate. I advance a reform agenda based on the concept of "deliberative equality" forwarded by Ann Marie Slaughter. (5) The application of deliberative equality provides a workable first step toward addressing the defects of current transgovernmental arrangements by reducing the extent of the participatory deficit. (6) Unfortunately, "transgovernmentalism" is entirely incompatible with deliberative equality, and it is precisely the transgovernmental characteristics and qualities of the GFA that have to be reformed and challenged if we are to arrive at anything approximating deliberative equality.
Deliberation and Global Governance
Recent global governance research has been characterized by a "deliberative turn." (7) This deliberative turn has concerned itself with how processes of deliberation might advance the accountability of global governance. Generally, advocates of a form of deliberative transnationalism (8) have contended that by sharing and making information available, deliberation has the capacity to reshape interests and participant understandings, leading to policy that is acceptable to a wide range of interested parties, resulting in more responsive and inclusive global governance. One argument in favor of deliberation is that it has epistemic value, improving the quality of information on which decisions are based, meaning that decisions are justified and based on a process of reason giving, leading to informed and careful judgments. (9) To realize such benefits however, deliberation has to be an inclusive process that brings a wide range of interested parties to the table.
A key question is what characteristics do verbal discussions and interchanges have to display to qualify as deliberation? Does a mere conversation qualify as deliberation, for example? For James Bohman, the key to what qualifies as deliberation is "equal access," or the reasonable expectation of being able to influence decisions that affect one's own life. (10) Likewise, Thomas Risse has suggested that participants in deliberation need to view one another as equals that all participants are able to challenge a validity claim and have equal access to a prevailing discourse. (11) It is these very criteria based on some degree of equality among participants and the capacity of verbal exchanges to influence outcomes that means that genuine deliberation can often take exclusive and elitist forms. To explain this further, the levels of mutual reciprocated respect necessary for genuine deliberation often exist only among like-minded elites. How various parties relate to and interact with one another, whether they have shared understandings and mutual respect, and whether viewpoints are modified and adjusted as participants show a willingness to learn from their exchanges in the search for an argumentative consensus all remain crucial indicators of deliberation. From an empirical perspective, therefore, it is useful to draw a clear distinction between genuine communicative deliberations, where actors show a willingness to take one another seriously and learn from one another, and mere conversations, dialogues, or consultations, which simply indicate that an exchange between various parties may have taken place. An unequal dialogue between two parties in which a conversation takes place, but in which one party can ignore the views of the other party despite the appearance of listening and take action or reach decisions while more or less completely discounting the views of that other party, should not be categorized as meaningful deliberation. In these circumstances, it is dialogues of the deaf that occur rather than genuine deliberation. Wim Duisenberg, first president of the European Central Bank, captured the very essence of this problem with his famous "I hear but do not listen" response to pressure from various political forces for interest rate cuts.
The current GFA consists of a number of institutionalized, or semi-institutionalized, settings in which policy priorities, agendas, and content are established among a limited number of technocrats and officials, and it is in these venues that the crucial deliberations concerning global financial governance take place. Informal consultations outside of these institutionalized settings are precisely that--informal consultations. However, they are not deliberation, and they should not be conceived as such, precisely because they invariably take place on an unequal footing, especially when those consulted with do not share the same basic premises, worldview, and technical knowledge as those officials that dominate the institutionalized settings of the GFA. Such deliberative spaces are difficult for outsiders to influence.
One of the more interesting contributions to the recent global financial governance literature has been Randall Germain's provocative argument that an emergent global financial public sphere is taking form, consisting of multiple interactions between four nodes: the government-led institutional framework at the global level; globally integrated financial markets; global media; and civil society. (12) Germain uses Bohman's definition of a critical public sphere, "clear modes of public reasoning, a plurality of participants and a growing critical reciprocity between participants," to suggest that these operational features of a global financial public sphere are becoming progressively realized. Germain's conceptualization of a global financial public sphere is a useful device in terms of imagining what a more progressive and accountable form of global financial governance might look like, but how accurate is it as a portrayal of how global financial governance actually currently functions? Certainly it is true that there are modes of public reasoning at work in the operation of the global financial architecture, but the extent to which they are genuinely open to the public at large remains questionable, and the plurality of participants and the degree of critical reciprocity between them is quite restricted. While global media and global markets influence agendas and priorities in a broad sense, the subsequent process of deliberation that determines policy solutions remains very much concentrated in the various (interstate, transstate) institutions that make up the GFA. In other words, there is a distinct lack of critical reciprocity among participants in the way the current GFA functions, and the plurality of active participation is severely restricted. The concept of transgovernmentalism can sharpen our understanding of the nature of these problems and what can be done to rectify them.
Transgovernmentalism and the Global Financial...
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